How does exposure to violence affect law enforcement officers’ mental health?

Correctional workers have a high likelihood of exposure to violence in the workplace. However, there is often little attention on the mental health consequences of prison work, as well as the institutional factors that might mitigate or exacerbate these effects.

In partnership with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), we conducted a state-wide survey of correctional officers to explore the effects of exposure to violence on the job. Conducted from March to May of 2017, the survey was sent to all correctional and parole officers working in the state of California, and had a response rate of approximately 42%. The final sample size was 8,334 correctional officer respondents and includes participants from every state prison. We find strong associations between exposure to violence and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicide risk, as well as symptoms of depression, alcohol abuse, anxiety, and sleep disorder. Importantly, we also find a potentially protective role of institutional factors, such as the quality of perceived management and supervision. Our findings also suggest that having someone to talk to about work-related problems is associated with lower intentions to leave correctional employment, while the opposite is true for coping mechanisms like alcohol use. 

How officers do their job can make a crucial difference in determining the culture of the prison. In this sense, the overall health of the criminal justice system is tied to the well-being of its frontline workers.

Our findings have important implications. Just as the incarcerated population in America has skyrocketed, the number of employees in corrections has grown. Our results suggest that, by largely ignoring the effects of prison context on officer mental health, scholars may have underestimated the collective social-psychological damage that has accumulated from more than a half-century of mass incarceration in America. Our results provide potential direction to policymakers and practitioners seeking to create an effective, healthy workforce.

This project was made possible with funding from the National Science Foundation, Center for Evidence Based Corrections, Fox Leadership Center, and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association